You can tell a lot about an epoch by why and how it laughs. "Why"
means the actual subject, which can be pretty much anything. "How"
means the mode, and to my mind that suggests one of two ways. One way
is ridicule, which implies unease with the subject, if not outright
fear of it. The other way is enjoyment. And that implies empathy,
understanding, maybe even identity.
Consider the different ways that white Americans have laughed about
the subject of race. Early in the nineteenth century vicious cartoons
and prints began to appear in the North about newly-freed
African-Americans. What those cartoons betrayed was the unease of
white folks about the consequences of slavery's destruction among
them and around them. The same point is true of the minstrel shows of
the Jim Crow era, throughout the land. In both instances the laughter
suggested that the whole idea was ridiculous. How utterly silly, the
hidden message ran, that these people should be free at all, let
alone that they should have a claim to be equal!
Compare the same subject now, as handled by Bill Cosby, or Eddie
Murphy. Their great theme is the same: the undeniable problems that
go with being black in a world that white folks run. But Cosby and
Murphy invite us all of us to identify with them as they cope with
those problems, not to poke fun at them for their daring to cope at
all. So too with us, our specific us, the transgendered of the very
late twentieth century.
Being on the high side of fifty, I can remember Milton Berle's
outrageous drag performances on mid-century television. I was already
a secret crossdresser and I already was dreaming about being a girl.
Still, I knew that the acceptable response was to hoot. So I hooted.
Sort of, anyway... as convincingly as I could. Which is as good a
case of self-hatred as I can imagine. Now, four decades later, I look
back on it with an historian's eye, and my historian's mind starts to
wonder. Was there some connection between Berle's crinolines and
wigs, and the deep disturbance that Christine Jorgensen had provoked
in mid-century American middle-class culture? Jorgensen certainly
became a subject of uneasy banter in my all-boys high school, at
about the same time. How many in addition to myself were masking what
we wanted and what we secretly did, with uneasy, forced guffaws,
ridiculing what, in fact, we were? How totally laughable that a man
should put on skirts, like Berle. How utterly ridiculous (and how
terribly fearful) that a man should really become a woman, like
Christine.
Compare any number of instances now. One, certainly, is the current
ad campaign that features Ru Paul in an extremely elegant male
costume, announcing that he has "no problems" with being a man. He
wears the mustache that signifies uncomplicated masculinity in the
African-American male code. He leans upon a phallic cane, as if to
underscore the point. But, few people in contemporary America can
miss the point: this proud-to-be-a-man is a drag queen for very real,
with none of the uncertainty that Uncle Miltie's crinolines used to
betray. We may smile at the conceit, but we do not laugh at him.
There is no ridicule involved. If we laugh, it is because we enjoy
the joke.
That's hardly the only instance. About a month ago I was listening to
a Blues program as I drove along. The Blues is mostly sad, but it's
also defiant about what causes the sadness. One track told of a
family's break up, because a wife had caught her husband with another
woman when she came home. That's a standard Blues image. It's not a
funny subject, especially from a child's point of view, and the
grown-up child of that failed marriage was singing the song. But
within the song the point of view shifted, from the boy telling the
story to his errant father, who had lived it, and who wanted
understanding. Gradually it emerged that the other woman who caused
the break up was the father himself. The whole song was a spoof on
blues conventions, but there was an undertone of seriousness, and of
asking for empathy in the choral refrain: "a man's gotta do what a
woman's gotta do."
Not long afterward Garrison Keillor got at the same point in his
Public Radio program, "A Prairie Home Companion." One of his
recurrent skits sends up the old Humphrey Bogart "film noir"
hard-boiled detective genre. The Keillor series is called "Guy Noir,
Private Eye." In the program I'm thinking of, "Guy" is dealing with a
tough cop who metamorphoses into an incredibly lovely woman for the
sake of deep cover. The cop's voice is included in the change, from
rasping masculine to utterly womanly. Didn't TG Forum used to run
some marvelous writing along that line? "Guy" finds himself really
attracted to "her." Had the scriptwriter been reading this site?
Examples have begun to multiply. I'm in a cinema waiting for the
feature to start, and two separate trailers for forthcoming films are
screened. Both deal with gender crossing. One film is the animated "A
Bug's Life," which includes the complexities of being a male Ladybug.
In the other trailer, for "Enemy of the State," the central,
sympathetic male character is asked by male heavies why he had bought
some lingerie. Was it for his wife? No, he replies, it was for him,
for some "weekend cross-dressing." Did he mean it? Probably not, but
I can't say for sure. I haven't seen the film yet. It's funny, but
the point is that crossdressing is something a person might do.
Clearly, we the audience are expected to identify with the guy who
claims he does it in order to save his skin, not to hoot.
It isn't just in the movies. I'm wandering through my local
supermarket and I notice that "A Bug's Life" is among the children's
books on sale. I pick up the book and I find the same theme as in the
film: it's okay to be a boy in the ostensible garb of a girl. On the
same shelf I notice the book from another Disney film, "Mulan" That
film starts off with a girl who is definitely a girl. It unashamedly
endorses her crossing from female to male. The times are hard, and a
woman's gotta do what a man's gotta do.
And none of it, not the Ru Paul ad, not the Garrison Keillor sketch,
not the Hollywood trailers and spin-off children's books, no, none of
it is vicious. There is viciousness out there of course, a murderous
lot of it. An ad, a radio program, some film trailers, and some
children's books drawn from the same films: these do not change the
fact that being black in East Texas, being gay in Wyoming, being F2M
transgender in the midwest, being a physician in upstate New York or
Canada who acts within the law to help women with undesired
pregnancies, all of these can get a person killed. The hatred will
not go away. It's up to all of us who might potentially feel its
horrible effects to do all we can against it, whoever might be its
immediate target. There is also laughter, though, warm laughter about
the very qualities that some people hate so much in others that the
death of the "other" results. It isn't the laughter of ridicule and
fear. It's the laughter of enjoyment, and perhaps even the laughter
of empathy. It isn't about otherness at all. To me, at least, that
looks like a very hopeful sign.
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